Sol is having a bit of fusion indigestion again and has belched forth one of the largest solar flares to come hurtling towards Earth in the past five years, according to NASA.
NASA said in a statement that the solar flare on March 6 at 7 PM Eastern time weighed in at X5.4 on the solar flare scale. The flare came from an area …

Re: i sometimes wonder

Re: i sometimes wonder

Yeah, look at all those over-paid scientists wearing bling and driving pimped-up mercs. Seriously, if you were money-grubbing, the last job you'd go for would be as a scientist. Most are poorly paid, work long hours and have to deal with conspiracy nuts and ill-educated morons like you.

Re: i sometimes wonder

Re: i sometimes wonder

Of course we all know that peer review isn't perfect, but do you _really_ think the scientists reviewing grant applications are likely to be impressed by lashings of "omg we're all going to die!" rhetoric in the case for support?

Re: i sometimes wonder

Different AC here. Prior AC is correct, the story has been, what's the term you Brits seem to like... oh yeah, 'sexed up' to generate more money for the groups that are involved in this sort of monitoring. As part of my tech support job, I come into contact with some of the folks who run these things, and they aren't the types to engage in the sort of end of the worldisms that every article I've seen about this have invoked.

Re: i sometimes wonder

The articles aren't targeting the scientists who approve grants, because scientists are rarely involved at the levels that matter. They're targeting easily led buffoons who will cry to their even more easily led buffoon pols to pump more money into the programs.

Re: Just lob a bloody big Gaviscon at it...

Any chance of times in GMT?

A little lazy of me to ask as a UK dweller, I suppose, but between recalling how far behind eastern time is and working out what you mean by "today" (I'm reading this tomorrow) things get a bit confusing in articles like this.

Re: Any chance of times in GMT?

Re: Any chance of times in GMT?

Perhaps if UK boffins published the information instead of our cousins across the pond, then the times would be in GMT. Why should hard working journalists have to translate times for us when they can just cut and paste the article and let all of us scratch our collective noggins to work out what the time is in real units.

OK, OK, I'm leaving, I know should bite the hand that feeds that bites the hand that feeds IT.

Re: Any chance of times in GMT?

Re: Any chance of times in GMT?

Actually, yes, UTC makes more sense. My point being more everyone who cares about this stuff ought to know their GMT offset but not everyone deals with Eastern time. I wasn't asking for a UK bias so much as a more globaly aware time format.

Re: Far fetched explanation

5,125-year Mayan Long Count calendar just hits reset on December 21, 2012.

Well that's probably an indication as to what happened to the Mayan civilisation then, their programmers only allocated 3 bytes for the year and the entire IT infrastructure collapsed after 999 years leading to a collapse of their civilisation.

It's the worst one in five years and they are talking about it taking out power grids, GPS, aircraft falling out of the sky and all the usual scaremongering BS. So presumably there was a worse one five years ago and I don't recall any of those things happening then. Can we assume therefore that they are exaggerating a tad?

The worst in five years...

@Grease Monkey

With any significant solar flare, there is ALWAYS a chance that some part of the power grid will go down. I don't actually have a problem with them mentioning that as it is better to be prepared and not need it, than unprepared and need it. What bothers me is that instead of reporting it as 5%, 1%, or 0.1%, the articles read like it is a 50% chance of mass blackouts across the [insert your locality here].

statistically significant?

Perhaps I'm missing something but

"one of the largest solar flares to come hurtling towards Earth in the past five years"

doesn't seem like a significant event to me. Five years is not a long period of time - surely the normal variation of solar flare size means that such a flare is to be expected. And this is just 'one of the largest' - not *the* largest, so it is presumably even less significant for that reason.